Underestimation turns bad

Looks like the great and powerful Ozes of politics and punditry completely missed the boat about The Donald.

I think it’s outrageously funny.

With the announcements last week of Ted Cruz and John Kasich suspending their campaigns, and with Trump’s latest decisive win in Indiana, the real estate baron has all but sewn up the Republican nomination for president in the November election.

Regardless of the amount of vilification, or of outright attacks and dismissals from colleagues, media types and politicians, Trump has maintained his lead and outlasted his competition.

It all boiled down to one thing: a complete and utter failure of everyone on reading the will of the voters.

News agencies, politicians, talk show hosts and even your everyday Joe the Plumber are all now trying to figure out what comes next. Do we unite behind the presumptive nominee? Do we form an extra special super secret branch of the Republican Party to mount a third-party offensive?

Do we rely on independent candidates to carry the day, or just resign ourselves to another term of Democratic socialism, sort of a third Obama term under Hillary Clinton?

All of these questions and plans point to one thing: “How do we keep this thing of ours in our hands, and not in the hands of the people who really should be running things?”

Because that’s the real reason for all the fear — fear of getting kicked off the gravy train, of losing the privileges, of losing the power and influence that has been amassed over decades of perversion of the Constitution.

A lot has been made about Trump and his experience, his background, his failures, his lack of political correctness and tact. A lot of that is a load of garbage. I say that because if the current crop of spineless conservatives and Democratic social engineers had an answer for the problems facing this country, they would have done it already.

But here we are, applying the same Band-Aids to the same problems and expecting better solutions. We’re already spending more money than we should on programs that don’t fall under the government purview; we’re trying old tricks and party favors that didn’t work then and won’t work now, and the only group that has benefitted at all from anything the government has done is the government itself.

Think about it: elected officials are getting rich, the only subset of the country’s employed that is growing is government employees (and oddly enough, wait staff). The country’s economic growth as measured by the Gross Domestic Product showed an anemic .5 percent increase, where 3 percent is considered normal.

It’s been years since we’ve hit that figure.

So now, we’re at a crossroads. Do we vote for the old way of doing things, of more government, less liberty (and voting for a third party will do the same thing), or do we try something new?

Don’t give me the business about Trump’s qualifications. He’s as qualified as any, and perhaps even more so than our current president, who wasn’t at all.